1922–1929: (The Press, the Courts, and the Mistake of Voodoo: Jolibois in and Out of Jail, the Lougawou Defense, and the Candle at Mèt Simityè): Borno and Ru…

1922–1929: (The Press, the Courts, and the Mistake of Voodoo: Jolibois in and Out of Jail, the Lougawou Defense, and the Candle at Mèt Simityè): Borno and Russell experienced common and continuing difficulties with the press. Edited in the polemic tradition of France, Haitian journals had only secondary regard for dissemination of news and none at all for truth — enjoying freedom and security unknown before the occupation, they delighted in attacking it with irresponsibility and scurrility licensed by courts that refused to convict an editor. Through part of 1925, a paper opposing Borno’s reelection carried a standing notice announcing that by order of the sanitary service the stinking remains of Luis would be removed in 309 days — the number changed daily — from the mausoleum to the city dump, while another paper urged readers to poison Borno. Terms of preventive detention under a 1922 law provoked domestic and international howls, though Jolibois fils was in and out so often that Dana Munro remarked he spent most of his time in jail by preference, and Ernest Chauvet, fat and flamboyant editor of Le Nouvelliste, was periodically locked up and by Seabrook’s account enjoyed himself hugely, devouring whole roast turkeys and drinking champagne. The roots of numerous problems reached into the courts, one of the few institutions the occupation utterly failed to reform — British Minister Edwards reported in 1929 that the maladministration of justice was the chief cause of trouble in Haiti, that the majority of judges were thoroughly bad and some well known to be blackmailers, and that while a Black foreigner might win his case against a Haitian, a white man stood little chance and a white American none at all. Criminal justice was erratic in the extreme — numbers of murder cases ended in acquittal on the sole defense that the victim had been a lougawou, and who could blame ignorant juges de paix for so construing a penal code that proscribed sorcery as a crime and recognized zombiism as a phenomenon. One of the occupation’s most serious mistakes — a mistake of ignorance — was to permit the Garde to be used in ill-advised attempts to stamp out Voodoo. Borno was deeply anti-Voodoo and the elite further confused the Americans with condescending attitudes giving the impression that Voodoo was superstitious rubbish capable of causing trouble among the lower classes. It is a measure of the occupation’s lost opportunities, during nearly two decades in Haiti, that no evidence can be found that senior American officials ever seriously comprehended Voodoo in its impressive totality as Haiti’s national religion. The Garde arrested and prosecuted Haitians for such crimes as preparing manje pou lesen — consecrated meals to propitiate the lwa — or conducting various Voodoo services. That a Haitian might draw no distinction between lighting a candle in the cathedral and lighting one at the foot of the giant fig tree, Mèt Simityè, overshadowing the gate of the Port-au-Prince cemetery, never seems to have penetrated — though on the part of the Garde’s Haitian officers there was comprehension and tolerance, as there occasionally was on the part of individual Americans such as Lieutenant Wirkus, who bore the portentous Christian name Faustin and was widely publicized as the White King of La Gonâve.